OCTOBER 1855
October 15th. This is our sixth month here now, but the truth is I don’t know where to begin. I’m not sure that today is October 15th. There is a flagpole in the courtyard flying a red-and-black flag. Our departure from Rio was delayed in the end. Now that we’ve reached our destination, people are testy and argue more than they did on the ship. The courtyard is what we call the space between the buildings where the road widens out. The settlement has thirty-eight log cabins with roofs covered with branches and two or three rooms in each one. We are free, no leaders or political advisers, just as Gorand originally proposed. He stuck around three or four weeks and then one day he left, supposedly he’s in another settlement, where they’re mostly Germans, called Trautes Heim. But most of our Germans stayed here. The women are shared, even for the Germans and Portuguese, but most of them only want to sleep with one man, seeing as they’re equal. Altogether there are 160 of us, including about 40 children. The children are shared too, and whenever they have a fight with their parents they go and sleep somewhere else. Elisabetta is expecting a child, but we don’t know whose it is. Nowadays I live mostly with Germaine Minne, who teaches geography and political history at the school. Besides the school, the settlement also has a Common Home, a well, a distillery, and workshops. The Common Home has a hearth, a table that runs almost all the way across the room, a cabinet with accounting and official documents, dice, cards, chess and checkers, and a shelf of books, most in French. There’s only one Italian one, Anarchists: The Perspective of a Mental Doctor by Dr. Cesar Lombardi, and several issues of Atheist. In the end, only forty-eight people came from our group. There are over a hundred older settlers and eleven Indian women, whom we acquired from the local chiefs in exchange for hard liquor. Zeffirino puts out a settlement newspaper, The Aware Anarchist, which he writes up in four copies; one he sends to Europe, one to some newspaper in Rio, one he keeps for himself, and the fourth one circulates among the settlers. Three issues have come out so far. He says it will be an important testament one day. The children go to school fairly irregularly, since they have the same rights as adults and no one can force them to. Zeffirino proposed that school be compulsory for children up to twelve years old, given that education is the pillar of awareness, and that everyone get the same education, given that it solidifies the collective. Decio was opposed, saying that upbringing comes from life, not school, and that having the same education for everyone is an invention of the communists who in reality long only for all people to be the same, and they call that a collective. Zeffirino replied that a collective means an association of people in which people respect one another based on common interests, and for people to have common interests, they have to have a collective upbringing. Zeffirino says that people like Decio aren’t true anarchists, they place the individual above society, which is an incorrect interpretation of anarchy, and is actually an expression of aristocratic condescension toward life, and perhaps even decadence. And we have to be circumspect, since anarchy conceived in this way can lead to tyranny and the extinction of civilization. Mr. Crisson said it hadn’t been proven that tyranny leads to the extinction of civilization, it may on the contrary contain within itself the germs of a more mature civilization, and in ancient Greece and Rome it was actually in times of tyranny that philosophy bore its most tasteful fruit. The question in fact ought to be posed differently, namely, is civilization necessarily a vehicle for freedom, and one might have doubts about that. The Indian women don’t want to alternate partners, they live with only one man, even if sometimes he has two living with him. Zeffirino thinks that care should be taken when having intercourse with the Indians to ensure that the mixing of races remains a marginal phenomenon. He proposed that we also admit some Indian men to the settlement so they could sleep with the women while the white men slept with the white women, but the settlers who lived with Indian women rose up against it. In the end the Negroes declined to join us and insisted on going back to the ship, even though Decio explained that they would be free in the settlement and said the words
Freedom, freedom. The Slavs went off in search of gold for their revolt against the Hungarians. When we landed at Rio, one of the Slavs turned out to be a young woman, a sister of one of the men, she had her hair cut short and didn’t speak. Jean Allegret said that women had a greater sense of harmony and were peace-loving by nature, and that women were the future of humanity, because they give life. Umberto said in reply that he’d like to know how women could give life if not for men, and for that matter men were more important, since in every seed was a viable fruit while not every fruit necessarily had a seed. There are signs up on the walls at school, or actually slogans: Do what thou wilt, All for all and none for one, Equality in freedom not slavery, Without freedom there is no discipline, and Humanity rushes on toward prosperity, peace, women’s liberation, anarchy, and harmony. Two fires have broken out in the settlement, one when lightning struck the granary, the other from someone smoking a pipe. Our living conditions are getting worse, there isn’t enough food, and supplies are shrinking daily. Last week we had to slaughter three of our last eleven cows. Jean-Loup and I signed up for a work group which is helping a local firm build a road. Jean-Loup lives with Adelina. We use the money to buy groceries in Palmeira. Ten to fifteen people from our settlement work there every day. There are also people from two other free settlements which also need money. Mr. Mangin also goes with us regularly. He was the one who found our first casualty, René Collet, who arrived with the last group this summer. We buried him in a meadow by the stream, with stones on the grave. Wilhelm also showed interest in Adelina, but Adelina says that she has to get used to it first. Dorgen says that we must overcome this phase, and one can live off ideals and a little bit of polenta. At least temporarily. We receive money from Older Brother in Italy, which he raised through subscriptions in anarchist circles, but it isn’t enough. Zeffirino drew up a questionnaire for men and women who have more than one partner. He says that this is a new socialist experiment whose results need to be analyzed and sent to Older Brother in Europe. It has questions such as: